GBS120-- Business Communication

The New York Times Bestseller #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller The essential leadership playbook. Learn the principles and guiding philosophies of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, and many others through illuminating conversations about their remarkable lives and careers. For the past five years, David M. Rubenstein--author of The American Story, visionary cofounder of The Carlyle Group, and host of The David Rubenstein Show--has spoken with the world's highest performing leaders about who they are and how they became successful. How to Lead distills these revealing conversations into an indispensable leadership guidebook. Gain advice and wisdom from CEOs, presidents, founders, and master performers from the worlds of finance (Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon, Christine Lagarde, Ken Griffin), tech (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook), entertainment (Oprah Winfrey, Lorne Michaels, Renee Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma), sports (Jack Nicklaus, Adam Silver, Coach K, Phil Knight), government (President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Pelosi), and many others. -Jeff Bezos harnesses the power of wandering, discovering that his best decisions have been made with heart and intuition, rather than analysis. -Richard Branson never goes into a venture looking to make a profit. He aims to make the best in field. -Phil Knight views Nike as a marketing company whose product is its most important marketing tool. -Marillyn Hewson, who grew up in a fatherless home with four siblings in Kansas, quickly learned the importance of self-reliance and the value of a dollar. How to Lead shares the extraordinary stories of these pioneering agents of change. Discover how each luminary got started and how they handle decision making, failure, innovation, change, and crisis. Learn from their decades of experience as pioneers in their field. No two leaders are the same.

Walter Isaacson's "enthralling" (The New Yorker) worldwide bestselling biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years--as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues--Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Isaacson's portrait touched millions of readers. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. Although Jobs cooperated with the author, he asked for no control over what was written. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. He himself spoke candidly about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues offer an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. Steve Jobs is the inspiration for the movie of the same name starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, and Jeff Daniels, directed by Danny Boyle with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin.

Challenging times will come, but great leaders know how to lead their teams and emerge even stronger--prepare yourself now using this helpful guide to personal and professional success.  Great leaderships will face challenges. Markets will collapse; pandemics will come; people will always provide new and interesting ways to makes things difficult. But leaders must achieve results and build a team that produces, even when you are faced with difficult circumstances. This all-new book from John Maxwell, created using content from several of his previous bestselling titles, is the ultimate guide to helping your team survive and even thrive when the unexpected happens. Maxwell helps leaders identify their team's main challenges, take stock of their liabilities, understand what they can control, and use challenges as opportunities to rethink the way they do things. He ultimately gives leaders the tools to grow their teams in the midst of difficult times.  Through humor, in-depth insight, and examples, internationally recognized leadership expert John C. Maxwell reassures leaders that they can still lead well and help people develop the skills they need to become great leaders, even when times are tough.

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER * "A landmark manifesto" (The New York Times) that's a revelatory, inspiring call to action and a blueprint for individual growth that will empower women around the world to achieve their full potential.  In her famed TED talk, Sheryl Sandberg described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which has been viewed more than eleven million times, encouraged women to "sit at the table," seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto. Lean In continues that conversation, combining personal anecdotes, hard data, and compelling research to change the conversation from what women can't do to what they can. Sandberg, COO of Meta (previously called Facebook) from 2008-2022, provides practical advice on negotiation techniques, mentorship, and building a satisfying career. She describes specific steps women can take to combine professional achievement with personal fulfillment, and demonstrates how men can benefit by supporting women both in the workplace and at home.

An engaging guide on how to develop and hone your professional communication and influencing skills in the digital age In a world where human interactions and behaviour are more pivotal than ever to business success, Working With Influence sets out nine easy-to-apply principles, based on robust behavioural science, for influencing people and outcomes in both physical and digital working scenarios. It provides ambitious professionals with a set of actionable principles which will help them kick-start, accelerate or transform their careers. Technology has redefined almost every job and is becoming the primary medium through which we interact with colleagues and clients - this book provides crucial insights into how you can influence others and stand out in this new digital landscape. With the hugely competitive and unpredictable nature of the job market and the unstable economy, it is more important than ever to improve your communication skills and broader qualitative skillset to ensure a prosperous career in the 21st century. This book's insightful principles are drawn from first-hand research findings and behavioural science data. Each chapter includes a wide range of relevant, applied workplace examples, as well as tools to help readers build their own action plans. Packed with practical guidance and psychological research, Working With Influence is the modern guide for anyone looking to improve their communication, networking and drive in business.

A Washington Post Notable Book This New York Times bestseller is a "masterful" (The Washington Post), "juicy tour of the company [Jeff] Bezos built" (The New York Times Book Review), revealing the most important business story of our time by the bestselling author of The Everything Store. Almost ten years ago, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone captured the rise of Amazon in his bestseller The Everything Store. Since then, Amazon has expanded exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries, while its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to nearly two trillion dollars. It's almost impossible to go a day without encountering the impact of Jeff Bezos's Amazon, between services like Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon's cloud computing unit, AWS, plus Bezos's ownership of The Washington Post. We live in a world run, supplied, and controlled by Amazon and its iconoclast founder. In Amazon Unbound, Brad Stone presents an "excellent" (The New York Times), deeply reported, vividly drawn portrait of how a retail upstart became of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. Stone also probes the evolution of Bezos himself--who started as a geeky technologist totally devoted to building Amazon, but who transformed to become a fit, disciplined billionaire with global ambitions, who ruled Amazon with an iron fist, even as he found his personal life splashed over the tabloids. Definitive, timely, and "engaging" (Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America), Stone has provided an unvarnished portrait of a man and company that we couldn't imagine modern life without.

Have you wondered why geese fly in V's as shown on the cover of this book?  The bird in the front works the hardest to generate airflow that makes it easier to fly for the ones in the back.  This is what a leader should do in any organization. The geese quack to communicate and encourage the team.  The team helps every goose. When one goose gets sick or injured and leaves the formation, a few others leave the formation to fly with him.  They stay with him until he can get back to the team. Communication, teamwork, and trust are the resources of leadership just like soil, fertilizer, and water for a plant. This is the reason why this book begins with an introduction, followed by these topics in its earlier chapters. The trunk of the plant stands up straight to the sky like a leader in an enterprise. Its leadership cultivates branches organized for R&D, Operations, and Engineering, and for Marketing, Sales, and Service to make them function well and grow. People in these organizations develop and grow like leaves on the plant taking sunshine and nutrition to function and prosper. The book discusses leadership styles in all different branches to grow the enterprise successfully. When seeding or planting a tree, we must visualize the space and surrounding in the years ahead for flowers and/or fruits to emerge. By the same token, a leader needs to be aware of the environment and Culture and to have the Vision to imagine how his/her organization would grow in the future. The author tells his real-life stories to illustrate his experiences and learnings in leadership. The book uses his practice-based theories to provide the scaffolding for others to think about and refine their approaches to lead and find personal fulfillment and happiness in life.

A New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller From New York Times bestselling author Cal Newport comes a bold vision for liberating workers from the tyranny of the inbox--and unleashing a new era of productivity. Modern knowledge workers communicate constantly. Their days are defined by a relentless barrage of incoming messages and back-and-forth digital conversations--a state of constant, anxious chatter in which nobody can disconnect, and so nobody has the cognitive bandwidth to perform substantive work. There was a time when tools like email felt cutting edge, but a thorough review of current evidence reveals that the "hyperactive hive mind" workflow they helped create has become a productivity disaster, reducing profitability and perhaps even slowing overall economic growth. Equally worrisome, it makes us miserable. Humans are simply not wired for constant digital communication. We have become so used to an inbox-driven workday that it's hard to imagine alternatives. But they do exist. Drawing on years of investigative reporting, author and computer science professor Cal Newport makes the case that our current approach to work is broken, then lays out a series of principles and concrete instructions for fixing it. In A World without Email, he argues for a workplace in which clear processes--not haphazard messaging--define how tasks are identified, assigned and reviewed. Each person works on fewer things (but does them better), and aggressive investment in support reduces the ever-increasing burden of administrative tasks. Above all else, important communication is streamlined, and inboxes and chat channels are no longer central to how work unfolds. The knowledge sector's evolution beyond the hyperactive hive mind is inevitable. The question is not whether a world without email is coming (it is), but whether you'll be ahead of this trend. If you're a CEO seeking a competitive edge, an entrepreneur convinced your productivity could be higher, or an employee exhausted by your inbox, A World Without Email will convince you that the time has come for bold changes, and will walk you through exactly how to make them happen.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and board chairman Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company's early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world's most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands. Young, searching, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed fifty dollars from his father and launched a company with one simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost running shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed eight thousand dollars that first year, 1963. Today, Nike's annual sales top $30 billion. In this age of start-ups, Knight's Nike is the gold standard, and its swoosh is more than a logo. A symbol of grace and greatness, it's one of the few icons instantly recognized in every corner of the world. But Knight, the man behind the swoosh, has always been a mystery. Now, in a memoir that's surprising, humble, unfiltered, funny, and beautifully crafted, he tells his story at last. It all begins with a classic crossroads moment. Twenty-four years old, backpacking through Asia and Europe and Africa, wrestling with life's Great Questions, Knight decides the unconventional path is the only one for him. Rather than work for a big corporation, he will create something all his own, something new, dynamic, different. Knight details the many terrifying risks he encountered along the way, the crushing setbacks, the ruthless competitors, the countless doubters and haters and hostile bankers--as well as his many thrilling triumphs and narrow escapes. Above all, he recalls the foundational relationships that formed the heart and soul of Nike, with his former track coach, the irascible and charismatic Bill Bowerman, and with his first employees, a ragtag group of misfits and savants who quickly became a band of swoosh-crazed brothers. Together, harnessing the electrifying power of a bold vision and a shared belief in the redemptive, transformative power of sports, they created a brand, and a culture, that changed everything.

Part of the series Exploring Effective Leadership Practices through Popular Culture, Urick examines management theories related to mentorship and learning, transformational and transactional leadership, ethical decision making, bases of power, mindfulness, multi-tasking, and more. As you learn to apply these theories, you can become at one with the Force to find balance in your leadership style. Each theory is viewed through the lens of various aspects of the Jedi approach to exerting influence. Through these examples, readers will become familiar and comfortable with academically supported leadership concepts to adjust their own behaviors, becoming more successful in the process. By examining leadership theories through the context of popular culture, the book encourages readers to think creatively about how they might adjust their own management approach. Readers will move from Padawan to Master quickly. May the Force be with you, Jedi Manager! The series aims to bring examples, theory and methodology of leadership to life by analysing academic concepts through popular culture examples that will appeal to a broad range of readers.